How did we get here?

Over 1 million clicks of the camera shutter ago, in a town not that far away……
Well, Your Big Day was created when professional photographers Anthony Higham LBIPP and Darren Findlow LMPA joined forces.
Anthony had spent a long career in broadcast television working on huge programmes such as This Morning and Emmerdale along with TV Classics such as Bullseye, Crossroads and Blockbusters.
A lifelong interest in photography soon led to it becoming a proper job and he soon was snapping away and getting recommended to do a friends wedding, then a friend of a friend and so on.

When Darren joined Anthony, ‘Your Big Day’ was formed and it was just at the time of the Digital Revolution. Weddings were still being shot on film but our new shiny Digital Cameras were being used alongside our film cameras to compare quality – it was a nerve wracking time as not much was known about how it would perform.
Eventually, as technology improved seemingly week by week, we made the break and ditched the film. No more ’12 exposures on a roll of film’ and we could instantly see on the back of the camera if exposure was correct. It also meant we could ditch the light meter and the tripod for the most part.

With the digital age firmly taken hold, it meant that we could upload the best shots from the wedding to our online gallery for our couples to view and share with their friends and family. Back in the day, we were one of only a handful of pro wedding photographers offering this service.

Darren came to Your Big Day with a background in Marketing and worked for some larger companies including Vodafone.
Luckily he also had great computer skills and was able to produce the wedding albums that our couples had always dreamed of, turning them into wedding photos that were fit for the glossy magazines.

At our height of success, our busiest year saw us shoot 64 weddings. May & September were always and still are to this day, the most popular months to marry and that year we shot 10 weddings in May alone.

After 9 years, we decided on a career change completely. We had achieved great successes in the Wedding Photography world yet we always had a burning desire to own a small hotel or Bed & Breakfast.
After a lot of searching, we settled on a Bed & Breakfast in the beautiful Cotswold honeypot village of Broadway. With just 5 bedrooms we were sure we could make it work.
We moved in the February of 2010. Closed for 2 weeks to refurbish and redecorate the whole house including the guest lounge and dining room and opened for our first guests on Valentines Day.
In the 3 years that we were there, we won many awards including ‘B&B of the Year’ in the whole of the Cotswolds and were named in the ‘Top Ten B&B’s of the UK’ by VisitBritain, the official Tourist Board.
We also got to Number 1 on TripAdvisor and maintained that position for the whole time we were there.

Three (very busy and exhausting) years passed and we decided to move down to Devon and take on our next project – find a plot of land and build a house! (We don’t like to get bored as you can probably tell)

Plots of land with planning permission to build a house are not always easy to come by but after searching for nearly a year, a plot came up for sale in Cheshire where Anthony is originally from.
18 months later and a few grey hairs and we are now living in our Oak Framed, highly efficient and environmentally friendly home and looking for our new project.

That leads us to this blog.

We have attended literally thousands of weddings between us. We are lucky enough to have seen behind the scenes and been party to creating the perfect day.

Surely it’s a shame if that knowledge was to just sit there and never be passed on?

We hope you enjoy reading this blog and find the advice and information useful. If there is anything you would like us to do a feature on, then just ask. The list of topics is endless and we have to start somewhere.